Like Christians through all of the ages, Saint Paul is filled with
awe at the grace bestowed upon him by God, a grace that enables him to have
fellowship with the Holy Spirit.Struck
by his union with God, Paul cannot
help himself from spreading the Good News, the Gospel.

Saint Paul,
apparently tripping over his own enthusiasm for the love of God, fulfills the
following admonition (which we intend to include with our 2006 Christmas letter).

They may see the good you do as self-serving.Continue to do good.

They may see your generosity as grandstanding.Continue to be generous.

They may see your warm and caring nature as a weakness.Continue to be warm and caring.

For you see, in the end, it is between you and God.It never was between you and them anyway.[1]

Mass begins by praying for the enthusiastic type of
fellowship with God which Paul
experienced and often expressed in his Epistles.Paul wrote his Epistles before the
Evangelists wrote.The assumption
follows, therefore, that the Evangelists explain Paul.Although there is no ongoing Sunday-to-Sunday
direct correlation between the Lectionary
Epistles and Gospels, I have always found insights flowing from one to the
other.Since I am concentrating on the
Greek of the Epistles this time through the three yearly Liturgical Cycles, I
am sensitive to the flow of insight from the First Testament to the New
Testament and from the Epistles to the Gospels.

This week, I happened to notice that the time I spent preparing
the Greek was about as much as I spent preparing the articles in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly.This helps explain why I write as much as I
do about the Greek.The Greek root word
for spreading the good news, spreading the Gospel comes out flat in
the Lectionary as preaching.Paul is doing more than preaching.He is spreading
the Good News, he is evangelizing.This
is much clearer in the original Greek.

Paul writes
that he cannot help himself.Sometimes
he trips over his own words in his enthusiasm and has to defend himself against
duplicity.That is what 1 Corinthians
9:16 means, woe to me if I do not preach
it!Paul does not mean that God will
punish Paul, but that Paul is compulsive about preaching, even to Corinthians
who will not understand.

Through these Lectionary readings, both the
Vulgate and the original Greek use the root word for evangelize six times.The Lectionary
avoids the word evangelize all
together, substituting the word preach
three times (1 Corinthians 9:16, 16, 18), offer
the gospel [sic] once (1 Corinthians 9:18), right in the gospel [sic] once (1 Corinthians 9:18),
and for the sake of the gospel [sic]
once (1 Corinthians 9:23).Since at
least one poll shows that evangelization is one of the priorities of the
Faithful in the United
States, the exclusion of that word from the Lectionary
translation is significant.

One wonders if this exclusion of evangelize anticipated the scandals of the television evangelicals
during the 1990s.The Lectionary
translators did not want association with such evangelism.Problems enough would surface during the
2000s.

Before getting too confident in the original Greek
words, note there are at least two unexplained punctuation changes in 1
Corinthians 9:17 and 18.One of these
changes substitutes a semi-colon for a comma after the Greek word for entrusted (1 Corinthians 9:17).The other omits a comma after offer the gospel (1 Corinthians 9:18).Since Greek grammar arranges words
differently than English, there is no Lectionary equivalent for omitting the comma.The Latin Vulgate, however, uses a period.The latest Greek version omits a comma after
the Greek word for offer-the-gospel.[2]The Vulgate keeps the comma.The Lectionary omits the comma.

The historian in me wants to know why these changes
occurred.The historian in me also warns
about making more out of the evidence than is reasonable.Finally, the historian in me wants to present
the evidence that significantly seems to go against my core belief that all of
the words, everything, in the Bible is divinely inspired.If the Faithful cannot be sure of the
original manuscripts, how can the Faithful be sure either of or what is
divinely inspired? The answer is the tradition of the Church.

At the risk of adding to the confusion, my thinking is
that anyone reading these Notes is no longer “weak,” so I present the
difficult material.My sense of “weak,”
is To the weak I became weak, to win over
the weak (1 Corinthians 9:22).Especially
toward the end of my formal teaching career, my students let me know that
sharing my degree of certitude was helpful, rather than unhelpful, in shoring
up how I see things.

By way of connotation, the word evangelize carries with it “a gaggle of commentaries by
conservative evangelical scholars,” as Calvin
J.Roetzel puts it.1 Corinthians 8:1—11:1 covers a range of
thought whereby Paul defends himself
against duplicity.[3]Since being human means being imperfect,
the Faithful can share in the embarrassment of Paul being misunderstood.

1 Corinthians 9:17, about Paul
preaching willingly and unwillingly, is about the Faithful resonating with the
preaching.When the Faithful resonate,
that is the reward in which Paul hopes to participate.When the Faithful do not resonate, Paul keeps on trying, filled with hope and grace, for
enabling people to understand the holy love of God.

Paul takes up
this issue of evangelizing as a matter of dispute over food offered to idols in
1 Corinthians 8:10—9:27.This includes
the interest of Paul in human
sexuality.[4]Paul writes about the effects of
knowledge upon the weak and, for the sake of the weak, he renounces some of his
apostolic freedoms.[5]This is similar to the way in which Catholic
vowed religious renounce their right to marry.

In the world of Saint
Paul, sharing food offered either in the Jewish temple
or in pagan temples, included something of the temple involved.In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul
is claiming a “basic eschatological freedom from the ways and expectations of
the present world.”[6]Do the Lectionary readings from 1
Corinthians 9 emanate from Paul?Scholars
think so.

Scholars question whether Paul
or a surrogate wrote various passages in 1 Corinthians.Except for 1 Corinthians 9:20-21, the Sunday Lectionary
includes 1 Corinthians 9:19-23.That
passage reflects the predominance of first-person verbs characteristic of Paul.Those verbs are: I am free, I have made
myself, I became weak, I have become all things to all, all this I do, and that
I too may have a share.Six times in
seven lines, this passage uses a first-person verb.[7]On this evidence, Paul wrote the
readings for this Sunday.

Scholars trip up over 1 Corinthians 9:18, offering the
Gospel free of charge versus full use of my right [to charge] in the gospel.Paul offering the Gospel free of charge is
like a teacher going beyond what is required by contract to enable students to
grasp the material.Paul is like the
teacher who admonishes students to put up with the teacher in order to learn
the material.Just as the teacher is
authorized by the administration to teach, in a similar manner, the preaching
of Paul and others like him is authorized by God to spread the Good News.[8]

Through using the Cross, Paul
makes sense out of Job.The Lectionary
begins with the Book of Job.Job
excoriates God for treating him badly.Job
exclaims that God is not treating him rationally.[9]Job 7:2 describes human life as a slave who longs for the shade, bringing
an African-American dimension into consideration.Job 7:7 bemoans, I shall not see happiness again.God is making no sense.

The Responsorial Antiphon, see Psalm 147:3a, Praise the Lord, who heals the broken
hearted is not only about the Faithful witnessing their children leave the
Church and their Church leaving them, but is also about Jesus
Christ witnessing and engaging sin.The 147th Psalmist recognizes the presence and fellowship of
God in human anguish.1 Corinthians even
finds goodness in suffering, because suffering brings the Faithful closer to
fellowship with the Holy Spirit.In this
age of returning space ships from the cosmos, Psalm 147:4 has special meaning, He tells the number of the stars; he calls
each by name.The Lectionary
is continually relevant to how life is lived, because the Lord does heal the
broken hearted.

The household of Peter
and Andrew must have been broken
hearted because the mother-in-law of Peter
was no longer waiting on them.Within
such a context, the Gospel according to Mark
explains Jesus as forming a Church to
explain suffering.Like important political
figures, who never arrive without their entourage, Jesus
enters the house of Simon
andAndrew with James
and John (Mark 1:29).Jesus is able to accept the accoutrements of
human adulation.When Mark portrays Jesus
as healing the mother-in-law of SaintPeter, Mark
shows a relief of suffering in the midst of feminist suffering.[10]Upon being cured, the mother-in-law
simply goes back to waiting on them, that is, suffering as expected.[11]

With feminine interest in the suffering associated
with injustices, RichardBauckham observes:[12]

[Kim]
Paffenroth assigns to L [Luke] only six of the nine pericopae mentioned above
as featuring women (Luke 7:11-17, 36-50; 10:38-42; 13:10-17; 15:8-10; 18:1-14).This is fewer such pericopae than Mark has (see Mark 1:29-31 [used here]; 3:31-35 (?);
5:21-43; 7:24-30; 12:41-44; 14:3-9; 15:40-41, 47; 16:1-8), and so [Thorlief] Boman’s
case for women’s tradition is not strong for this version of the L hypothesis.

Borman’s case is “that the whole of Luke’s special material (so-called L) derives from a
circle of women disciples, including Joanna,
who were the eyewitnesses, traditioners, and custodians of a cycle of Gospel
traditions.”[13]The point is that the concern of Jesus
for outcasts permeates the sources describing what he did.The concern is not from what Saint
Luke’s special material had about Jesus,
but about Jesus himself.

The ministry of Jesus is connecting the Faithful with
the love of God.The Biblical text of
Mark 1:39-41 is one of several (Matt 9:9-12, 21:30-33, Luke 3:11-14, 7:28-30,
14:12-14, 17:11-13) where Jesus is “free to disregard tradition and free to
identify with … outcasts.”[14]Such an ability to identify with
outcasts is germane to the Black experience in the United States.In the remainder of the Marcan reading, Jesus
goes on to cure those who come to him; but his purpose is not to cure, but to
use curing to demonstrate that God loves the Faithful.Evidently worn out from evangelizing, Jesus takes a break early before dawn (Mark 1:35), to get away by himself, before
accepting the call, by Simon and those who were with him (Mark 1:36)
back to his ministry of demonstrating that God loves the Faithful.

This Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time is about the
overwhelming, overpowering love of God for the Faithful.This love of God is the Holy Spirit.Mass begins by praying for fellowship with
this same Holy Spirit.Job is about
recognizing that suffering is real.Paul
is about not caring about human suffering.Paul only cares about the Good News of fellowship with God.The Gospel is about portraying that God loves
the Faithful.